Messaging as an API, Positioning First & the Curse of Knowledge

Hello and welcome to season two of Adventures in Messaging. I'm your host Emma Stratton, and today for the first episode of this season I am super excited to be joined by Indy Sen, VP of Product and Platform Marketing at Matterport. Hey Indy!

Hey Emma, nice to see you. It is so good to see you. I love following you on LinkedIn and seeing all of the posts that you share — I love your perspective on messaging. Another messaging fan!

Yeah yeah yeah — I really loved the other day you talked about messaging and you likened messaging to an API...

...like messaging should be seen as an API within a company — and I thought that was super cool. Could you tell me a bit more about what you mean by that?

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe this is by virtue of having worked on a lot of technical products in my marketing career — the inner nerd in me kind of made this analogy a couple years ago, actually of all places when I was at WeWork, when I was trying to describe to my team what good messaging is and how it can be leveraged in an organization. I was telling them that if done right it should be something as simple as: "Hey, I need messaging for this" — and then it's given back to you. A good product marketing organization is always the standard bearer for that. If you can have messaging be as natural and as accessible as an API to the rest of your organization, it's basically a multiplier.

The best messaging to me is something that's clear, concise, and repeatable — something that you could fit on one slide for a product or for a specific audience. There are a lot of messaging frameworks out there, but if done right it's something you could hand over to a team like that. At WeWork, for example, I had my regional manager in India who took a look at a messaging framework we had for WeWork for enterprise and was able to say: "Oh, this is great because I can localize this one — this one doesn't resonate as much in our market, but these three value pillars really do." That's the sign you've done it right.

If you do it right, you're not going to spend a lot of cycles downstream. It's something that people can ladder up to and pick what resonates. And it's also a living and breathing thing — like an API, you're always going to add endpoints and improve over time. Look at Stripe, look at Twilio — they've always continuously improved their APIs. For me, that's how I think about messaging: canonical, but also something that gets better and that the rest of your organization benefits from.

That's so good! Amazing. Please may I borrow that? Yes, I will definitely quote you on it. It's a really great analogy to help people understand the power and the utility of a messaging strategy in an organization.

So when it comes to great messaging, what is foundational? What comes first, in your eyes?

It's a question I've gotten a lot lately — we're in the throes of it here at Matterport, up-leveling how we want to talk about our products and our overall platform. We have a lot of talented people who can write great messaging and copy, but I think it comes back to first principles. The precursor to any good messaging has to be positioning. If you don't align on what your product is, what it does, who it's for, what makes it special, what breaks it from the pack — you're not going to be able to translate that into messaging that really resonates with your specific audience. So positioning is always a precursor and has to come first.

It's also something that, if you're not aligned on positioning, you need to be very quickly — because it's going to be an impediment to crafting that messaging. It's also a great alignment mechanism. You want to catch it early, but it's an absolute precursor and primitive to messaging.

I like that you bring up alignment, because it's hard to align on a message. Let's talk about alignment for a second — it's a huge piece of product marketing, trying to rally an organization around a core message. It's not easy. What are your thoughts on getting people aligned?

Alignment is definitely a shared goal, but when it comes to messaging, it's on the product marketers and the product marketing team to make sure people are aligned on what we're going to say and how we're going to say it.

One of the analogies I remember from my Google days — I'm a big movie nerd — is that product and engineering comes up with the plot of the movie. But then it's one thing to go from the plot to the actual narrative, and that's where marketing, specifically product marketing, takes those plot points and delivers a really compelling story.

An example: I have young kids, so we took advantage of HBO Max streaming Godzilla vs. Kong. Actually a pretty good movie — I like those big monster movies. State-of-the-art effects, good clean fun. You're not going to get an Oscar-worthy performance, although you do feel for King Kong. But what stood out to me was the synopsis: "Two titans clashing — a battle of the decade, with unseen forces behind the scenes." So you're intrigued. And I watched it and thought: this was actually pretty well executed, because that plot and the through line of the movie were consistent.

Then I thought back and I'm a big comic book nerd — I remember being very disappointed with Batman vs. Superman a couple years ago. The plot point is exactly the same premise: two titans who clash for the first time, an epic battle, unseen forces behind the scenes. But then the execution completely faltered. And I'm like: how did they make a movie more emotionally resonant between two giant monsters who don't even speak to each other — where you feel the tension — than one with these fabled properties that have existed for 80 years, where everybody knows Batman, everybody knows Superman?

Going back to messaging and alignment: even if you have the best idea, if you're not aligned on how you're going to deliver it, that's a huge pain point. In B2B especially — unlike the consumer world where you can rest on great product alone — all of the wrapper, messaging, and execution matters even more. That's where alignment and good positioning become essential.

One of the mechanisms I use is Geoffrey Moore's positioning framework from Crossing the Chasm. It's something I've often referred to in my career and shared with my teams and cross-functional stakeholders. I just went through this exercise for the Matterport platform — workshopping it with our engineers, our product managers. It's interesting: people touch on different things, and nobody's right or wrong, but you get those perspectives and come up with a statement that everyone's comfortable with. Something as simple as: "For people looking for X, our product is a product that does Y. Unlike other products in this category, our product is different because of 1, 2, 3." Very simple — somebody posted a version on GitHub. If you take that prompt and fork it for your positioning, time and time again it's helped me knock out really successful messaging.

And like you mentioned, workshopping as a group is a great alignment tool — it brings it down to something very crisp that everyone can see, everyone can rally around. And then you can create messaging that naturally flows from that positioning, rather than — God forbid — creating messaging and trying to retrofit it into a positioning.

Yeah exactly. You got it. That's right.

Another thing I love about you, Indy, is that you've got a real passion for the customer in the work that you do — and the customer plays a big role in messaging. Tell me a bit about that.

What I've always enjoyed in my career as a marketer is that you learn so much from talking to your customers — whether it's the customers of Google Workspace or someone using your developer product. When I was at MuleSoft, I'd spend a lot of time with developers to understand in their words how they were using our solution. As an integration platform and middleware, it's a pretty complex product, and the best way you can illustrate it is through customer examples. Positioning tells you what you're building and why, but it's very different to then see what your customer has to say about it. Is what you built resonating in the market?

It's always eye-opening when you get that customer perspective, because sometimes it's so fresh and so pithy that you think: let's inject that directly into our marketing. Let's take that home page banner we spent a week on with copywriters and replace it with this customer quote.

One example that's always stood out: this was a little over ten years ago at Salesforce. We were on the ground floor of the Salesforce Platform — the AppExchange ecosystem, bringing partners to build on our platform. We were doing a video with a customer who was using Force.com — Salesforce's earlier platform-as-a-service offering. He was a technical architect, I believe at CIA Technologies. During the video shoot, totally unprompted, he gave us this line: "Force.com is that robust layer of 'I don't have to worry about it.'"

This is a developer, an architect who sweats the details, who has to think about infrastructure. And if you could just explain what platforms and services do in layperson terms — Sesame Street simple — it's: "A robust layer of 'I don't have to worry about it.'" I was like: this is gold. Maybe it doesn't resonate for everyone, but for someone shopping around platforms and checking off requirements, having that statement from someone of that stature as a reference is pretty powerful.

So overnight I wrote it down. We were creating a landing page and I gave the quote to the copywriter, who was like: "This is money — let's use this as a pull-out quote, as banners, everywhere." Not only is it pithy, it goes to the heart of what you're trying to say, and it's third-party validation. You could have written "our product is robust and reliable" — but having someone say it verbatim? Extremely powerful. So yes, always work in that customer angle whenever you can, whether it's the practitioner, the buyer, or the decision maker.

When I do customer interviews I always transcribe all the conversations and highlight phrases that come up, because customers will explain things just naturally differently than you. A lot of it is the Curse of Knowledge — when you're on the inside and you know everything, you have this way of talking about a feature or a benefit, and customers will just cut to the chase. It's so pithy and you're like: wow, that's brilliant. They're not weighed down by all the technical knowledge that you have.

100%. And sometimes you'll get really into your inside baseball — you're so used to speaking about your product in a certain way, that's the lens you see it through. Then getting somebody from the outside looking in and saying — one of my favorite examples that you used the other day, Emma, was when Apple marketed the iPod: "A thousand songs in your pocket." And then you look at how any other MP3 player was marketed — "a 3.5-inch hard drive with 456 megabyte capacity." You're like: no, just say a thousand songs. You lost me.

So sometimes you take that customer perspective, or you put yourself in their shoes to say: I love how this was built, how technically advanced it is — but what's in it for the customer? Can I empathize exactly with what they're after, that aspiration they want, and plug that into my messaging? That's what moves the needle.

You've been at some amazing companies. We've got a lot of product marketers watching this show — what advice would you give to other product marketers? If you could go back and say something to your younger self, what would you share?

I think this is applicable to any career. I've been in the product marketing field for quite some time and it's a profession I'm absolutely in love with. The advice I'd give came from an early mentor of mine at Salesforce, Jason Garoutte — a lot of people kind of go through your life like a constellation, you'll always meet them again. He went to the same business school as me and gave me a lot of advice early on. The advice was: there is a time to learn and a time to earn.

Early in your career, if you're teaching yourself a new skill set or a vocation or a craft, you're going to have to burn your stripes. You have to learn and be that humble sponge — have that growth mindset. But at the same time, nobody else is going to look after your career other than you. It's not like in school where you do well on a test and automatically get the dean's list. In real life that doesn't happen — you have to actively groom and design your career.

There are times where you have to challenge yourself to learn what you don't know and keep teaching yourself new things. There have been times in my career where I felt stuck and stagnating, but I was still learning something that would be really useful down the road. The balance is this: if you're in a place where you're learning and earning — that's amazing, there's nothing like being paid to do a job you love and are good at. Sometimes early in your career you take a hit and optimize more for learning than earning, and that's fine — you need to get the craft. But if you're in a place where you're earning but not learning, or neither — that's the tough spot, and you have to really ask yourself: why am I still here?

At Salesforce I learned a tremendous amount, but I had entered an era where they had stopped giving stock grants broadly. Every day the stock was on the rise and I'd be happy for the company, but I didn't have skin in the game. I wouldn't be anywhere without that baseline at Salesforce — it's one of the best sandboxes for an enterprise marketer. But then I had my first child, I needed to get to the next level, and that's why I took opportunities in other areas where I could continue to learn and have more skin in the game. Be very deliberate about those two avenues. Don't settle for one where you're making money but stagnating.

I love that — and they rhyme! How great is that. Solid advice that anyone can take, not just someone in marketing. Super awesome chatting with you, Indy. Thank you for the advice, and thank you everyone for tuning in for the first episode of season two. Definitely come check it out next week for more insights from the wild and wonderful world of leading product marketers.

Amazing. Thank you, Emma. Great job!